Puppy Love
by Beeblebabe
Summary: Hinata has a familiar visitor while in the woods.


            On days like this, when summer was fading, it was nice to enjoy lunch outside.  The weather lacked the fire of summer, but hadn't yet moved into the true cool crispness of autumn.  And, on top of the pleasant temperature (although Hinata would never admit it, not to anyone else, and only barely to herself), the real benefit of eating outdoors was that you could get away from your family for a while.

            She had a little place she liked to go to, on the other side of the village from the Hyuuga compound; a little secluded wooded area out towards the training grounds.  She'd found it once with her teammates when on a mission.  Akamaru and Kiba's noses had been very useful in finding the client's missing watch.

            She didn't like to think of it as a picnic, because you needed more than one person to have that, but she'd brought a blanket to lay on the ground and a neat set of boxes to carry her food.  The trees would start changing colors in a few weeks, and then go bare; it would be harder to hide in a place like this then.

            She had just begun to eat her omelet when a noise from the trees made her sit upright and open her eyes wide to her surroundings.  Even after all these years, her heart pumped with terror at the first hint of a threat.  Her hands didn't shake anymore, at least; before, the chopsticks in her hand would be clattering together.

            The noise, a shuffling of branches and snapping of twigs, came again, and she opened her eyes wider to scan in each direction to see what was coming.  There was something almost familiar in the rhythm of the walking; it sounded like the thoughtless stride of...

            "Na-Naruto-kun!" She dropped her chopsticks as he entered the clearing.  She tried to pick them up, but now her hands were shaking.  She settled on folding her hands up to chest and looking down at where Naruto's feet came to the edge of her blanket.  His toes were dirty.

            "Hey, hey, Hinata-chan, thought I'd find you out here!" Her stomach lurched, as always, when he said her name.  "Uh, I mean..." Naruto shifted a little from foot to foot, flexing his dirty toes.  "Oh, I mean that I wanted to see you! And I saw you in town, and I followed you out here!"

            Her head swam a little as she felt prickles in her cheeks.  "You... you..." The words were rocks in her dry mouth.  "You wanted to s-see me?"

            Naruto plopped down to her level in a crouch, and for just a moment, he was at level with her eyes.  She gasped a little and turned away, busying her shaking hands with futilely reorganizing her lunch boxes.  Something had looked strange about Naruto, but she couldn't place it; it was hard to think or even see straight, anyway.

            "Of course, of course!" Naruto laughed, that little chuckle, and she dropped the lid of the box.  "And not just because you've got lunch!  ...but it _does_ look good."

            With the instinctive ease that being brought up in a formal household had given her, she began to divide the parts of her lunch into two portions.  _Not just because..._  She dropped a few bits of pickle into the grass, and hoped that Naruto didn't notice.  _Not just because..._

            She almost couldn't hear the second set of footsteps crashing through the forest over the pounding of her own heart, but Naruto's sound of dismay focused her in on the problem.  This intruder (or was it more than one? There were many footsteps) had a familiar rhythm to it, too...

            "Akamaru!" Naruto shouted as the dog bounded into the clearing.  Naruto lept to his feet before the large animal could eagerly greet him.  Hinata chanced a glance upward to see _anger_ on his face, and a certain something _off_, like catching a glimpse of something out of the corner of your eye, then turning to see that nothing was there.  She focused hard on him, trying to discern what could be different, what made him seem hazy around the edges.  Perhaps it was just her nerves.

            "You idiot dog!" Naruto barked at Akamaru, who was excitedly trying to leap up to lick his face.  "What are you doing here? Don't you know any better than to bother me _now_?" Naruto's tone rang against something Hinata's mind just as her eyes snapped to full focus.  It hurt to see.

            "Kiba-kun?" She could see it clearly now, the illusion.  Underneath Naruto's skin, there was Kiba.  At the sound of Hinata's voice, his head snapped up, and for a moment, she could see the expression of tangled fear and shame on the faces of both Naruto and Kiba before it got hard to see at all.  She dropped her eyes and blinked many times, but they wouldn't quite clear.

            Hinata heard the soft sound of the transformation being cancelled, and then Kiba's voice growling, "Go.  _Now_." at Akamaru.  _It isn't his fault, Kiba-kun_, she thought as she went through the old practice of holding her breath and counting to eight to keep her eyes from burning.  _I would have seen eventually.  Why..._

            Kiba knelt before her.  His toes were dirty, too.  "Hinata... I..." He reached out a hand to touch her, and her head started to swim from holding her breath so long.  "I'm sorry.  I didn't mean to... I wasn't trying to hurt you, I just..." He drew his hand away, clenched in a fist.  "I just wanted you to see.  That I'm... that I can... he's not..." Kiba stood up and took a few steps back.  Both of his hands were in tight fists.  "I meant what I said!"

            She didn't watch him run off into the woods.  She counted to eight as she let out her breath, then put the bases of her palms to both eyes.  A minute spent like this brought her back to safety, and she began packing up her lunch boxes.  She had lost her appetite.

            When she left the clearing, she met Akamaru, cowering near a large oak.  He approached her with his tail between his legs and his head turned down.

            "It's okay, Akamaru," she whispered after a long minute and rested her hand upon the dog's head.  "It's okay."


End file.
